Unifying Publications to Provide Business Intelligence

Challenge

As the primary news and business intelligence provider for critical healthcare issues, IBI's Pharma and MedTech divisions' need to be the first and fastest in information delivery was not being met by its existing website infrastructure and authoring systems. Velir engaged with IBI to pull its disparate workflow processes into a unified authoring system on the Sitecore platform.

Approach

The effort enabled IBI to serve all of the content for its publications and drugs and companies' databases through a single web presence. IBI's editorial teams were provided with an integrated set of authoring tools allowing them to author and style content in Microsoft Word, push this content into the CMS and subsequently, syndicate it to 5 different channels. The idea of "author once, publish anywhere" informed this effort and enabled articles to be disseminated through a specialized medical ticker feed and an RSS feed, pulled into Adobe InDesign for print publications (using Sitecore PXM), showcased on the website, and incorporated into email marketing, all without having to log in to Sitecore. Additionally, we designed our solution to empower IBI to expand these capabilities to their other verticals (e.g. logistics BI, agricultural BI) over time.

We also designed a custom workbox so IBI’s editorial teams could work on multiple articles at once without having to drill through the Sitecore tree. Being able to make edits in Word, update tagging, send docs back to authors, and advance articles through the workflow was critical to the day-to-day operations of the editorial team. Accordingly, the specialized workbox allows editors to be able to filter and find articles quickly and easily by date, taxonomy, publication, author, etc., and, more importantly, open up the associated Word docs for the desired articles (from the Sitecore media library).

The integration of Salesforce's CRM allows IBI to personalize visitors' web experiences and determine their product needs. IBI is now able to rapidly introduce new content and improvements to their site, expanding their customer base through tailored, easy to find content and an enhanced user experience.